Saturday, September 22, 2007

Yup. I was tired of the incredibly slow speed, RSS feed problems, and other annoying stuff. So I spent this morning migrating Planet Atheism to WordPress, using an aggregating plugin. I even changed the theme so that it looks like the old PA. :)

The good stuff:

- no more slo-o-o-owness (as in more than 1 minute to load the page)- no more limits to the number of aggregated blogs- a more "current" piece of software (WordPress is frequently updated, highly popular, and very well supported)- no more hiccups with the RSS feed- (this is mostly for me) no need to use a separate web server so that Simplepie memory leaks don't affect the rest of the sites.- a search feature- real, permanent archives (don't worry, every archived post still links to the original version, so search engines will recognize that PA is the duplicate).

The bad stuff:

- no more short posts version / list of post titles, at least for now. My stats show that very few people use the former, and if you really need something like either, you can just feed the RSS feed (!) into an aggregator and choose "titles only", or something like that- I've just configured all of this, so there may be problems I haven't detected yet.

For some days now, the PA feed hasn't been updating itself, affecting email subscribers too. This is a technical problem; the software used for PA apparently doesn't scale too well with a large number of member blogs.

I've already looked into it a bit, and will continue to do so. If nothing can be done, I'll try to switch to some other software, or possibly even begin to hack my own. This will take some time, though.javascript:void(0)

For the moment, I apologize for the inconvenience. The "normal" version of PA (that is, browsing to planetatheism.com) still works.